Wanda's Ramblings

Grief

I have heard it said that grief is love with nowhere to go. I’m not sure I believe that, but I guess it is about as good an explanation as any. What I believe today is that grief is a complex of feelings and comes in many varieties. I can grieve someone else’s loss and that is not the same as grieving my loss. I can grieve for someone lost long ago or I can grieve for a new and especially painful loss.

So, it would seem that grief does come in many shapes and sizes. I am by no means a stranger to grief, but I don’t think you could call me an expert either. Since grief comes to us all differently I don’t think there is a proper way to define or quantify grief.

My journey through life and grief is quite complex and has taken many paths over the years. For much of my life, I was probably unable to have any real grief because I didn’t give a crap about anybody. Pretty hard to grieve someone you felt nothing for. On the other hand, I spent most of my life either dissociated into oblivion or intoxicated into numbness, and usually both. Again, pretty hard to grieve without access to feelings.

The funny thing is that the grieves I remember the most from those days were all for animals. I was torn up over the loss of tigers and other large animals at a sanctuary where I volunteered. Reba, Tripoli, Lenny, Raja, and so many others. I think that I actually connected with them better than people back then. Also, they were all coming out of abuse as was I. So, it was the actual connection I grieved.

Therefore, it would seem to me that I was grieving the loss of the connection more than the loss of the object. That makes a lot of sense to me because I have eventually grieved all the grief I never felt during the years I was distracted by mental illness and addiction. The key to that was that as I have healed mentally and stayed sober my mind has rebuilt those connections and I now can grieve the loss thereof.

Again, I say that grief is very complex because of the way I have grieved the loss of my mother. For much of my life, I compartmentalized and buried her memories and death. After many years of therapy, the whole picture is clear to me today. Of course, I grieve her physical loss, but I also grieve the loss of a mother, a writer, a friend, and even a lover in my experience of her. Once again, there is a connection to be seen in each of those roles she played that I lost the day she died.

If I am grieving the loss of a connection I don’t think I ever truly get over that. The very word connection implies that it is not casual or superficial but intentional and complex. It is like the fibers of their being have woven and dug into me and there is no way to remove that. I think that is why every once in a while when I think I am done grieving something like a sound, a song, a smell, or even a situation will cause those remaining connection fibers to vibrate and reignite my grief.

In the end, I see that grief is not love with nowhere to go but a connection with nowhere to go. That can explain a lot because I will grieve the loss of a connection when it tries to reach out, like when I get the urge to call someone only to remember they are gone. And that does not always mean they are dead just that the connection is gone. I grieve over the loss of friendship or love as much or more than death. Death is easy enough because it is final but the loss of connection to a former friend or lover is worse because the bargaining phase of grief never really ends in those cases.

If connection is the key to grief, then it would be easy enough to just not make any more connections. The problem with that is that being human one of my drives is to connect. We are socially programmed creatures, so it would seem it is impossible to live life and not make any meaningful connections.

Of course, I cannot avoid grief for the rest of my life because it seems to me it is part of the human condition. Therefore, I need to be very careful with my connections moving forward. I do not always realize the depth of a connection until it is broken, and the grief comes. The flipside of that is if I am careful to only make high-quality connections then the grief is of a higher quality as well.

With all of this in mind, I can look at grief in a different light and see it as more of a celebration than pain. I have come to embrace and at times almost welcome the feelings of grief. Strangely it is like having the connection back for a minute because at least for me grief always comes with memories. Memories that may have otherwise been left buried away or at least ignored.

Today I try to take the high road of grief and celebrate the connection that once was and not just cry over it. In a way that makes the connection more important than its loss. And that is beautiful.